Abstract
Coordination is a core concern in social science. Problems as diverse as deciding where to go to dinner, what price to charge for a good or service, which political candidate to support or what regulatory policy to adopt all contain coordination as a core element. Most coordination problems arise among actors connected in a network, and these connections can both improve and impede a group’s ability to achieve coordination. To model how links influence coordination we distinguish between “constraining edges” that make coordination harder by reducing the number of equilibrium outcomes, and “redundant edges” that make coordination easier by merely increasing communication without affecting the number of equilibria. We show experimentally that the addition of constraining edges reduces coordination, while redundant edges improve subjects’ ability to solve a coordination problem.